Last week legal publisher Fastcase included Free Law Project
co-founders, Brian Carver and Michael Lissner on the company’sannual
list of “Fastcase 50” award
recipients. As their
press
release
explains, “The Fastcase 50 award recognizes 50 of the smartest, most
courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, and leaders in the law.”

Michael and I are humbled by and grateful for this recognition. We’re
especially thrilled to see individuals we have worked with included on
this year’s list, such as:

Frank Bennett, who created the Free
Law
Ferret,
adapting some of CourtListener’s citation-finding code to JavaScript
and enabling users of the extension to find citations on any website
and then get the documents from CourtListener.

Jake Heller, CEO of
CaseText, whose team there has frequently
been a helpful sounding board when Mike and I are thinking through
the interesting questions that arise when trying to put useful legal
research tools on the web.

Colin Starger, of the University
of Baltimore School of Law, with whom we’ve had great conversations
about citations, metadata, and bulk downloads, not topics of
conversation that everyone has as much experience with as Colin!

David Zvenyach, General Counsel to the
Council of the District of Columbia, who saw that we hadn’t gotten
around to adding scrapers for the D.C. Court of Appeals or the
District Court for the District of Columbia to
juriscraper and wrote
them for us.

These individuals were obviously recognized for their broader work, but
we were excited to see those with whom we’ve already made a connection
getting much-deserved recognition. Especially since we all join a
distinguished group of past winners, many of whom we’ve also received
advice or assistance from, including: 2013 awardees Bob Berring, Josh
Blackman, Sara Frug, Tim Hwang, Dan Katz, Dan Lewis, Eric Mill, Josh
Tauberer, and 2012 awardees Jerry Goldman, Waldo Jaquith, Peter Martin,
Elmer Masters, and 2011 awardees Monica Bay, Tom Bruce, Sarah
Glassmeyer, John Joergensen, Carl Malamud, Rob Richards, and Tim
Stanley. At various times we’ve been inspired by, gotten advice from, or
gotten help from all these folks, among others, so we think they deserve
some credit for any headway we’ve made on the problems we’re tackling,
while we’re happy to take all the blame for any missteps or not making
more progress faster.

The only problem with these lists is that Fastcase CEO, Ed Walters,
should be on there too. Thanks, Ed!